A Rosetta Stone for the Past Decade in American Politics

Well, it’s been a week! Your Friday roundup just barely made it out on Friday. But without further ado…

In the waning days of the 2012 presidential election, Mitt Romney’s political team genuinely believed they were on track to win. These were the days of the “skewed polls,” you may recall, and the theory went something like this: President Obama had expanded the minority share of the vote from 23% in 2004 to 26% in 2008 and scored unheard-of margins with those voters. He would be lucky to maintain those numbers absent the unprecedented enthusiasm behind his initial campaign, yet public polling models saw him progressing further. Instead assume an electorate similar to 2008, and the race was a dead heat. Assume a return toward the pre-2008 norm and Romney was comfortably ahead.

On election day, the public models proved right. The minority share of the vote grew to 28% and Obama won it by more than he had four years earlier. The rest is history. By which I do not mean, “and Obama was then president for another four years.” No, I mean “and the solidified overconfidence in the durability of Obama’s ‘coalition of the ascendent’ initiated a catastrophically foolish strategy for the Democratic Party that culminated in its devastating this week.” That’s why your one thing to read is an extraordinary essay written by famed political analyst Ronald Brownstein in early 2013, “With New Support Base, Obama Doesn’t Need Right-Leaning Whites Anymore.”

Why am I assigning you this dusty relic from a bygone era? Because it’s important to understand that the corrosive identity politics embraced by the Democratic Party over the past decade is not some inadvertent and emergent phenomenon that rose from the grassroots and just got a bit out of control. Statements like “the Democrats thought they could win by turning their back on the white working class and building a coalition dependent entirely on young voters, minorities, and affluent white women” are neither hyperbole nor mean-spirited efforts at racializing or balkanizing an otherwise healthy politics. I mean, my gosh, look at that headline.

This was the plan, adopted from the top, stated clearly for all to see and understand, and embraced and applauded as a wise and appropriate method for building a durable, progressive governing majority. “Obama is now unreservedly articulating the preferences of the Democratic ‘coalition of the ascendant’ centered on minorities, the millennial generation, and socially liberal upscale whites, especially women,” wrote Brownstein:

In his victory, Obama reshaped the Democratic coalition by both addition and subtraction. Because so many of the blue-collar and older whites who formerly anchored the conservative end of the Democratic base abandoned Obama, and because more-liberal voters took their place, the coalition that reelected him was much more ideologically unified around a left-leaning agenda than has been usual for a Democratic nominee.

That outcome, insiders acknowledge, gives the president greater confidence to move forward aggressively on these issues without fear of dividing his supporters. Equally important, the fact that Obama’s key groups are all expanding within the electorate has stirred optimism among his advisers that the coalition of the ascendant could provide Democrats a durable advantage in presidential elections.

Can I interest you in some foreshadowing? “By making it more difficult to recapture culturally conservative whites,” wrote Brownstein, “[Obama’s] approach will increase the pressure on his successor to maintain lopsided margins and high turnout among minorities and young people; Republicans believe that will prove more difficult without Obama on the ballot in 2016.” As Bill Galston screamed into the wind, the strategy “will antagonize the same groups of folks over and over again, and they will be spitting mad. … They will have been confronted and affronted on every front.”

The story holds an important lesson for each party.

For the Democrats: Spare us the lamentations, the “I don’t recognize my country,” the blaming of the people voting against you. You placed a huge, risky, era-defining bet that you could come out on top by undermining our national solidarity and enshitifying our politics, and instead you lost. 

The plan did not work because it was a bad plan, premised on categorizing people by their immutable characteristics rather than respecting them as individuals, and then taking for granted their support for an agenda defined by an increasingly out-of-touch elite. By the end you were suggesting that white women must be voting against you because they are afraid of their husbands. Identity politics is a failure—indeed it never succeeded when not held together by one man’s sheer force of personality. Move on.

For the Republicans: This can happen to you too. Beware of strategies you’re embracing, or comments you’re making, that might look as foolish a decade from now as Brownstein’s essay does today. Democratic politics is dynamic and complacency is deadly. The moment you are not working to expand your coalition and speak effectively to new constituencies, you are falling into bad habits and falling behind. 

I realize that the term “inclusive” may not be popular on the right these days, and perhaps seems especially out-of-fashion this week. But I will use it anyway: No political movement in modern America will succeed for any significant period of time without being intentionally and aggressively inclusive. Some of the people who are in the coalition now are going to leave, which means you’d better have a plan to add even more of the people you just beat. Indeed, the moment of victory is the moment when outreach is most important. Is that as much fun as gloating and retaliating? No. But I promise it’s a lot more fun than what the Democrats are facing.